From “Fired” to “Hired”

As you discovered here first, I did in fact fire myself from my own consultancy. At the time, I couldn’t say what was ahead. While the papers were signed, all I could note in the release was:

As for Mr. Berkowitz’s career post-Serial Marketer, he anticipates making an announcement before the end of the year. He is looking forward to being part of a larger, global team doing breakthrough work to solve some of marketers’ most pressing challenges.

That larger, global team belongs to Sysomos, a leader in social listening, analytics, and content publishing, which also has some advanced tech like image recognition used to monitor content shared about brands. I will be the marketing tech company’s first Chief Strategy Officer, and it’s the first time I’ve held such a role, though I do like to say that I was the first person 360i hired with strategy in their title (and I’m still fairly sure that’s accurate).

On the Sysomos blog, I write in detail about how I wound up there, along with what I want strategy to mean in this kind of role. It’s a little idealistic. When I wrote the piece, I was thinking about what I’d write here, which may reach a lot of strangers but is particularly well followed by friends. I wanted it to be far more personal than what you’d typically read on a corporate blog. And it’s a small sign of how I hope that more personality can infuse the marketing tech world that talks far too much about product features and far too little about people; that’s both a personal bias and the bias of one whose most recent full-time job was marketing an agency.

You can also read the press release, because everyone loves reading press releases.

MediaPost also covers the news in its Richard Whitman column. Whitman writes, “In his blog post, Berkowitz quotes himself and it is, perhaps, the best way we have ever seen someone leave a job and announce a new one.” Wow. Thanks, Richard.

For those who are curious, I will keep up the Serial Marketer blog under this name going forward. That was always the idea. I kept up my previous incarnation of the blog, MarketersStudio.com, while working for three different companies (not counting my consultancy), dating back to November 2005. Now, I have a newsletter, which I will still use (though it may be slightly more sporadic than the set monthly cadence I established so far). I like having a scratchpad for ideas, and an outlet for topics that aren’t always exactly what I am focusing on through my employer. You don’t need to work for yourself to have your own outlets, so in a way, it’s the best of all worlds.

Thanks for joining me along the way.

Lastly, a request:

If you use Sysomos and have any opinions on it, or you use a competitor and have opinions on Sysomos, or you think there could be ways to collaborate, I want to hear more. Contact me via the blog, or at dberkowitz (at) sysomos (dot) com.